CFL, third grow, bagseed from EXCELLENT bag (popcorn)

[irydyum]

Yes, of course. Although it may not be a genetic problem necessarily. It was really really excellent weed obviously grown by someone who knew what they were doing. I would have to think that most likely the light cycle got screwed up because someone who is that skilled would be checking for herms and using plants with low tendency to herm. It would have sold for $20/gram instead of $60/half if it weren't for seeds, so my guess is that a screw-up happened in the grow.

Not trying to nit pick what you are doing there, but isn't this whole statement just support for what I said previously. You grew seeds from a crop that you feel was hermied by poor light discipline, or extended power outage, or whatever the light may have done. What part of that doesn't suggest that your hermies are a result of the genetics you began with? You grew seeds from a genetically inferior crop, and you are getting the same result. Am I crazy here for seeing it this way?

I have had plenty of issues with power outages and such in the last couple years, but I finally have my hands on proper genetics and it seems that good genetics make a much better margin of error for the grower. I suppose this is all just one growers opinion tho, so take it for what it's worth.

Keep pushin!!

[EnhAnceD]

hmm. interesting at least. So when and why would a plant go hermie. Iv been reading the threads but havnt come upon one that explained better. If your plant is male its just going to grow seeds, if your plants a female obv flowers(bud). But if you mess up lighting, damage, stuff along that nature your plant could go female male and grow grate buds but lots of seeds and thats how we end up with seeds in the weed?

[headshake]

Yes, of course. Although it may not be a genetic problem necessarily. It was really really excellent weed obviously grown by someone who knew what they were doing. I would have to think that most likely the light cycle got screwed up because someone who is that skilled would be checking for herms and using plants with low tendency to herm. It would have sold for $20/gram instead of $60/half if it weren't for seeds, so my guess is that a screw-up happened in the grow.

it's not hard to miss a nanner, especially on a bigger grow. and it doesn't take long for one to grow, make a flower and send pollen on it's way.

how many seeds did it have in it if it went from $20/g to $60/half? way to many obviously. so that would lead me to believe that the person growing it might not have had such a good grasp on the situation.

maybe i'm reading it wrong?

Not trying to nit pick what you are doing there, but isn't this whole statement just support for what I said previously. You grew seeds from a crop that you feel was hermied by poor light discipline, or extended power outage, or whatever the light may have done. What part of that doesn't suggest that your hermies are a result of the genetics you began with? You grew seeds from a genetically inferior crop, and you are getting the same result. Am I crazy here for seeing it this way?

I have had plenty of issues with power outages and such in the last couple years, but I finally have my hands on proper genetics and it seems that good genetics make a much better margin of error for the grower. I suppose this is all just one growers opinion tho, so take it for what it's worth.

Keep pushin!!

i hear what you are saying irydyum. makes perfect sense. i've even heard of unscrupulous seed vendors selling seeds from a hermie as female.

hmm. interesting at least. So when and why would a plant go hermie. Iv been reading the threads but havnt come upon one that explained better. If your plant is male its just going to grow seeds, if your plants a female obv flowers(bud). But if you mess up lighting, damage, stuff along that nature your plant could go female male and grow grate buds but lots of seeds and thats how we end up with seeds in the weed?

a plant can go hermie any time during flower (not sure about veg, if you let it veg long enough?). this can happen for many different reasons. pH problems, nute problems, lighting problems, flowering time and genetics like pointed out above. those aren't all of them, just giving you an idea.

in nature this is a way of continuing on the family lineage, so to speak. the reason female flowers grow so big is because their whole mission is to collect pollen. so they grow in hopes of catching some. as a cannabis plant comes to the end of it's life cycle and it still doesn't get pollinated it can grow "nanners", or male sex organs, release pollen, pollinate, make seeds, die and the lineage goes on.

the seeds you would get will be all female, as they will be a 100% genetic replica (only female DNA was ever used). but as mentioned, a lot of times the beans of a hermie have a propensity to hermie.



-shake

[JD1stTimer]

You can make even the greatest of genetics go herm. Every plant has a certain amount of stress you can put on it before it will herm. The tendency is what gets passed on. Not the herm itself. If it was because of a light problem then minus the light problem, minus the herm.

This wasn't feminised seed though, which pretty much contradicts what I said. The grower didn't have a herm, he had a male that he didn't catch in time. Probably a short branchy male that looked like a female and just got overlooked somehow. Which would explain why my males were so short and branchy.

Enhanced: They can go hermie from genetic predisposition (do not want, kill it, throw away all seeds if there are any.) or from environmental stress. It's something that is meant to ensure their survival if something bad happens and they think they will die before they get pollinated.

Males do not produce seeds they produce pollen. Females produce flowers, and if the flowers get pollinated, then the flowers produce seeds.

Anyway, I know for sure that I got at least one excellent mother plant so I will definately be keeping her.

The one that I was picking at yesterday looks kinda ugly now so I might just cut it early and try growing her again. Her stem broke in flowering (I was trying to train her and she was too brittle already) so if it is a herm that could be what caused it and not genetics. If I grow it perfectly this time and it herms then I will get her out of my life hehe. She tries to stretch more and just doesn't seem to be bulking up as well as the other one anyway.

I might get rid of the sativa. It has been taking its sweet time and it hasn't even budded yet, just shown sex. And she is doing her best to stretch into my light.

One other plant looks like she might come out real good. She seems a tad bit slow though. Who knows maybe I should just keep my best and chop the rest. I think it would be wise to finish all four of them though just to be sure with the exception of the sativa if she just takes forever and ever and ever. She was meant for outdoors anyway, which isn't doable at my house.

[irydyum]

hmm. interesting at least. So when and why would a plant go hermie. Iv been reading the threads but havnt come upon one that explained better. If your plant is male its just going to grow seeds, if your plants a female obv flowers(bud). But if you mess up lighting, damage, stuff along that nature your plant could go female male and grow grate buds but lots of seeds and thats how we end up with seeds in the weed?

When and why would a plant go hermie? Poor light discipline, extreme temperature shock, water stress, pretty much anything you can do to send a shock through the system COULD cause a hermie but doesn't guarantee one.

This is beneficial in the creation of femenized seeds, but the trick is, you have to harvest the pollen from the hermied plant, and use it to pollinate a HEALTHY plant. That is how the seedbanks are getting em last I read.

Common misconception with new growers, male plants do not grow seeds. They grow pollen, the pollen travels via air to the pistils on the female, the pistil sends the pollen down into the calyx, and there the magic happens. The only thing the male grows is pollen, not seeds. It lacks the female reproductive organs, can't have 2 dudes making a kid now can we? Be a much stranger place if we could, I think.

Your last sentence is correct, that is what you end up with (hopefully) if you mess something up and the plant self pollinates.

[Italiano715]

Also, you can catch the pollen from any plant (hermie or male) and control pollinate the lower bud sites on your plant that don't get a lot of the light. That way you can still get seed for future grows, but then you won't have a whole seeded crop! Only the bud sites your introduced the pollen too! :jointsmile:

[irydyum]

You can make even the greatest of genetics go herm. Every plant has a certain amount of stress you can put on it before it will herm. The tendency is what gets passed on. Not the herm itself. If it was because of a light problem then minus the light problem, minus the herm.

I hope i wasn't misread here. I wasn't trying to say that my genetics won't go hermaph if I wanted them too. I'm just saying that in the normal day to day shit we go through as growers, power out, missing h2o for a day, small light leak, these things don't seem to have as much effect on STABLE genetics as they do on random bagseeds. I'm really over this though, I'm not trying to tell you not to grow, what to grow, or that your plants suck, I'm just trying to offer a rational explanation for people who keep running into hermaphrodidic bagseed.

[JD1stTimer]

Yeah of course. I know where herms come from. I just don't know in this particular instance if it was genetic or due to breaking the stem. Anyway I cut it up and quick-dried it and I'm going to flower another clone of it and see what happens.

Although in a way I am thinking I have one great mother plant, why mess around with any that aren't the best. But then again you don't know for sure until you sample bud that has gone to full ripeness and been dried and cured properly, you weigh it, etc then you know for sure which plant is best. Although you do have clues along the way.

[irydyum]

Some things will just never change Shake. I swear, we should all just re-invent the wheel, apparently years of success amount to nothing anymore.

I should have just followed my instincts and stayed away from this one, but there was some confusing information in here that bothered me so I couldn't.

JD- Best of luck to you and all your named ladies and trannys and whatever else you may see on your journey to curing. I'm sorry I keep challenging everything, it's just my nature. I try to stick with facts and not speculations or hypotheses, so forgive me that.

I figured everyone on here was like me, in search of the BEST possible smoke they could have, but it would appear that some just want to show what they are doing and defend all of their missteps, which I suppose is cool too, just not one I should be involved in.

[JD1stTimer]

Irydyum I don't get your point. Are you saying that you somehow know what caused that plant to go hermie? Maybe it was genetic. Maybe it was because I stressed it by trying to train it in flowering. Thanks to the advice of HeadShake I won't be trying that again. That was good critique on my grow, it was helpful and informative. :thumbsup:

If you know the answer to this question, then tell me, was it due to genetics or stress? Also if you somehow know that bit of info please tell me how you know. I am trying to decide if I should keep that mother or not.

I am simply documenting what I'm doing and where my logic is coming from. The reason I say the weed was grown by someone who knows what they were doing is because it tasted great, smelled great, looked great, got me high as fuck, it was trimmed right, dried and cured right, in short, it was weed of a quality you do not produce if you aren't taking the time, effort, and have the experience to do things right. BTW it had maybe 12-15 seeds in the half-o. And it was from a male somewhere, not a hermie, because about half of the plants I grew were full-on males.

If my techniques aren't valid I would like input on that, and the reason why. And I don't think complaining about the poor genetics that bagseed growers encounter is very helpful to anybody. Okay, buying seeds is not an option for me, either financially or from having a safe place to ship it to. Same goes for lighting, nutes, containers, odor control... there is no grow shop and I don't want to ship this stuff in. The choices here are Lowe's, Home Depot, Target, and Wal-Mart. And I have a financial problem too, so maybe my shit isn't elite like yours. Does that mean that I don't know I could have a better grow if I start with some sweet-ass known female Purple Urkle clones from San Fuckingcisco and used 1000w HID lighting and a fancy carbon scrubber, maybe some thermal shielding to avert the FLIR? Of course I know that, and I know I'll have better yields if I veg my clones a few weeks before putting them in flower. I put them under 12/12 directly from cutting for a certain reason, which was to get rid of the males quick so I don't have to fuck around with them and risk spilling pollen. Now I am just finishing out the flowering of the females so I can figure out which plants are doing the best with what I can give them. So far I have a female which has a gorgeous little bud on her, and I guarantee you it's going to smoke great! Right now I think she's so good I'll never let her get lost, and I guarantee you at some point I'm going to cross her with herself so I can put the seeds in a vault somewhere. So no joke that I named her. Wow that is so dumb and frivolous, isn't it? Especially to someone like you whose plants already had names you didn't even have to think of. Who knows, maybe one day you will be buying the strain Audrey IV and telling some noobs how no wonder they got herms because bagseed is no match for Audrey IV. And guess what? It will be a strain that thrives in low lighting, has a low odor profile, clones as easy as pie, and is resistant to going herm. Who knows maybe when I'm developing the strain I will use herm resistance as a trait I select for!!

I have to use seeds from the best seeded weed I get my hands on and pick the best plants from that. And the best seeded bags aren't crazy-ass chock full of seeds. Those seedy bags are all field-grown sativas, an example of which can be seen in various pictures in this grow log. And unless something real special happens with her flowering she is gonna get composted. In fact I think she is gone tomorrow if I still feel the same way. So far she has just continued stretching into my light fixture and not flowering except preflowers. Although it has only been two or three days since she showed sex.

The thing is, I only have four mothers and good seeds are hard for me to get a hold of, clones are impossible to find which makes it more important that I don't compost a great plant by something simple like not finishing out flowering to do a taste test before deciding. So if my herm was caused by stress there's a chance she's still a keeper. This little incident just means I won't know that for a few more weeks. Sure bending her was a noob mistake. Does that show enough humility, for me to admit I made a mistake?

You try to stick with facts, not speculations or hypotheses. Well where do you think your facts came from? They were already known from time immemorial? I bet at some point they weren't facts at all, they were just speculations and hypotheses until someone decided "Hey, I'm gonna find a way to determine the truth about this", and they did experiments to find out. I've heard that chlorine in tapwater will hurt your plants. It sounds plausible. Some people here may swear it will damage your plants. I gave half my plants tapwater and half of them springwater. At least in my setup there is NO difference I can tell so far. To me it is a fact that tapwater does not hurt your plants. My water is also very very hard and very alkaline. Apparently that isn't causing a problem as compared to my springwater plants. Maybe with a better setup, or with better genetics there could be a difference, but if I have someone new who is using soil and CFL and wants to know if tapwater is okay, I am going to tell him that it's just fine for that situation, because for me there was no discernible difference. So is that speculation and hypothesis? It WAS before I tested it.

Maybe you should have read more of my posts before criticising what you consider to be arrogance toward the wizened sages, and belittle the fact that I named a plant, and to try to bring in Headshake who I know has some REAL wisdom and great advice to anyone who is really trying to work hard and find the answers on their own. But I am pretty sure he won't go for your bait. I guess everyone here ISN'T like you, though we all want the best possible smoke. I happen to also want to know what factors DON'T harm your smoke, and what factors DON'T help your smoke. That is why sometimes I do things that I have HEARD are bad. Where's the study? Who has tried it on some plants and compared them side by side?

Well, I ENJOY that process, and I learned from this little grow that with MG time-release soil, CFL lighting, small pots and small plants, and whatever seeds I managed to get, using bottled water instead of tap offers no benefit. Maybe I will do it again but using all clones from the same plant instead from different plants. And if I offend you by "re-inventing the wheel" instead of doing whatever you tell me to do, then you have a thin skin.